The present invention generally relates to management of service requests and, more particularly, to data visualization of service requests.
Service companies encompass a wide variety of industries including aviation, automotive, construction, medical, military and aerospace. In performing its duties, a service company must intake service requests from its customers and complete them in a timely and satisfactory manner. The management of service requests can be a complicated task, where a variety of factors must be taken into account, such as the due date of the request, the priority of the request, dependencies on other requests, etc. The service company must further determine how to allocate labor and other service company resources towards completing the service requests, based on the aforementioned factors. The problem of managing service requests in such an environment is compounded when the number of service requests that are handled increases dramatically.
The task of managing multiple service requests becomes more difficult when customers interact with the service company during performance of service requests. A customer may review priorities, add additional service requests or change due dates, all during the life cycle of a service request. When factors change during execution, the service company must re-shuffle service requests to once again determine priorities and calculate division of labor and allocation of service company resources. This can be tedious, time-consuming and results in a constantly changing picture of service requests and their priorities.
One approach to this problem is a message-driven software system whereby service requests, or messages, are organized by due date. This system arranges service requests by due-date and allows the service company and the customer to view the status of a service request. The system also allows a customer to communicate with the service company via messages during execution of service requests in order to edit service requests, provide additional information about a service request or add additional service requests. Because this system only takes due dates into account when listing service requests, however, the actual priority of the item being serviced must be calculated by an administrator or other person based on a variety of other factors. This includes reading and processing of messages received from the customer and contacting customers or field service representatives via telephone or email to ensure correct prioritization of items being serviced. Constantly processing messages from a customer and re-calculating priorities in a non-automated fashion is time-consuming and burdensome. This problem is compounded when many, sometimes thousands, of messages are received in one day. Often, messages are overlooked and service requests are not properly prioritized, leading to missed deadlines and unhappy customers.
As can be seen, there is a need for an improved automated system for managing service requests. Moreover, there is a need for an automated method for dynamically organizing multiple service requests as factors change during execution.